By Chris Williams 02 Oct 2002
Well, no ATR today… but then again, I’ve avoided getting stuck with asinine assignments. ‘Course that’s mainly due to the fact that I’ve physically avoided those responsible for assigning said tasks. >sigh< Ain’t life grand in the Dilbert world.
<p>So instead, I’m listening to the new album by Common Rider – the band fronted by Jesse of Operation Ivy fame. Zen-Punk, and fun for the whole family. Steal your copy today!</p> By Chris Williams 01 Oct 2002
Well, another day has come and gone at the Viagra Factory (or “Pfactory” as the wags down there would put it). I’ve recently stepped into my new shoes as the “Document Coordinator” for our building. Which, as far as I can tell, makes me the archive bitch. For all of those who knew me in college, I’ll admit freely that my organizational abilities have not improved in the time since graduation… as plainly evidenced by the state of my apartment. And now I’m in charge of shipping junk off to be microfilmed, shipping junk off to be filed somewhere in the bowels of Pfizer, and pretty much every other mundane task associated with data storage.
<p>The one saving grace is that I’m in my very own private abode (the archive room) where I can listen to muzak at the volume to which I’m accustomed. So far it’s been mainly up to the Rancid and Dropkick Murphys level of mayhem. Today, tho, I had to go over an ass-load of <span class="caps">SOP</span>s coming up from NJ… I’m bringing in the <span class="caps">ATR</span> tomorrow, in case I get stuck with that crap again.</p>
<p>Yeah, work is work is work… it is, however, an endless supply of kooks, weirdos, and other misfits who wear their social problems on their sleeves. Oh, and there are some <em>real</em> losers, too. It’s pretty much an amalgam of “Dilbert” and the place where Dan Akroyd works at the beginning of “Spies Like Us.” I think it was about my second day there when I was roped into making a prank phone call to some poor lady at the credit union.</p>
<p>I think in the meantime, we’re supposed to be testing pharmaceutical products for impurities and/or degredants… but really, it’s like a cGMP deGrassi high.</p>
<p>Now, if only Connecticut sold beer past 8 p.m. …</p> By Chris Williams 01 Oct 2002
Hey, it’s October 1st. Thought for the day: Why isn’t the person responsible for that “skaterboy” sone strung up by her entrails? Or at least poked repeatedly with hot forks (y’know, for those of you opposed to the whole capital punishment shebang)
By Chris Williams 27 Sep 2002
yrs truly, the Rev, is horribly drunk right now… Testing to see if I can post this to me diary…
By anders pearson 27 Sep 2002
some people seem to have the ability to instantly transition from sleeping to awake and alert. as soon as their alarm clock goes off and their eyes open, they’re operating at 100% mental capacity.
i’m not one of those people. i believe that i truly should not be held accountable for anything i do or say within about 30 minutes of waking up. my mind just cannot go from sleep to awake in a short period of time.
when i was at <a href=”http://www.mssm.org/“>mssm</a>, we used to have fire drills in the dorms. sometime in late october or so, they thought it would be a good idea to have a 4am drill. being northern maine, 4am in late october means that it’s really cold and there’s a thin layer of ice on the ground. i didn’t actually become conscious until i was about 100 feed away from the dorm, standing in the parking lot, on the ice, in bare feet with no idea how i got there, what was going on, and why my feet were freezing. somehow my roommates had gotten me out of bed and directed me, zombie-like, out the door. naturally, all my classmates had been alert enough to grab some slippers or shoes so the next day, i was the only one with frostbitten feet.
that’s a pretty extreme example. most of the time, when my alarm goes off, i wake up in a semi-conscious state where i might be able to remember it later but i have no ability for rational thought. my brain seems to stay in that sort of dream-logic mode.
yesterday, when my alarm went off, i somehow “discovered” the snooze button. now, i’m a big fan of the snooze button; i’ve probably hit it 5 or 6 times a day, every workday for the last couple years. but yesterday, in my sleepy state, the discovery that “if i stick my arm out from under the covers and hit this button over here on the alarm clock, i get to sleep for another 10 minutes!”, was totally new to me and had all the perceived importance of discovering a practical method for cold fusion.
i’ve apparently been awakened numerous times by phone calls and managed to carry on groggy but somewhat intelligible conversations that i don’t remember any of later on.
my job allows me to keep pretty flexible hours and basically come in to work in the morning when i feel like it, but occasionally we have meetings scheduled early in the morning that i’m supposed to go to. of course, i’m notoriously bad at showing up on time for these (at other times, i can be annoyingly punctual). with my rational mind working, i know that if i have a 9am meeting, i need about an hour to take a shower, put in my contacts, get dressed, and walk to work so i <em>need</em> to get up at 8am to make it on time. of course, when 8am hits, this airtight logic falls apart and 4 or 5 snooze buttons later, i finally become alert enough to realize that i have a meeting in 15 minutes and i end up sprinting up amsterdam ave unshowered, wearing whatever clothes were within reach.
By jere 21 Sep 2002
I know I saw this on the wall in the teachers’ room at Hodgdon High School, but when it appeared on the wall in the teachers’ room at Wellesley, I decided it deserved another round of appreciation…..
Let me see if Ive got this right. You want me to go into that room with all those kids and fill their every waking moment with a love for learning. Not only that, Im to instill a sense of pride in their ethnicity, behaviorally modify disruptive behavior, and observe them for signs of abuse, drugs and T-shirt messages (and check to see that shorts have a 4 inseam, blouses cover belly buttons, and no ones crack or underwear is showing).
I am to fight the war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, check their backpacks for guns and raise their self-esteem. Im to teach them patriotism, good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, how and where to register to vote, how to balance a checkbook and how to apply for a job, but I am never to ask if they are in this country illegally.
I am to check their heads occasionally for lice, maintain a safe environment, recognize signs of potential antisocial or suicidal behavior, offer advice, write letters of recommendation for student employment and scholarships (although I dont have to write more than 25), encourage respect for the cultural diversity of others, and oh, yeah, teach, always making sure that I give the girls in my class 50% of my attention.
Im required by my contract to be working, on my own time and at my own expense well, OK, I might get 10% of the cost back from my school district, summers and evenings, towards additional certification, advance certification and a masters degree, to sponsor the cheerleaders or the sophomore class, and after school I am to attend committee and faculty meetings and participate in staff development training to maintain my current certification and employment states. And I should try to attend the after-school and weekend games my students play in, to show that I am interested in them and their lives outside my classroom.
Im to collect data and maintain all records to support and document our buildings progress in the selected state-mandated program to assess and upgrade educational excellence in the public schools.
I am to be a paragon of virtue larger than life, such that my very presence will awe my students into being obedient and respectful of authority. I am to pledge allegiance to supporting family values, a return to the basics and my current administration.
I am to incorporate technology into the learning, but monitor all web sites for appropri-ateness while providing a personal one-on-one relationship with each student. I am to decide who might be potentially dangerous and/or liable to commit crimes in school, or who is possibly being abused and I can be sent to jail for not mentioning these suspicions to those in authority.
I am to make sure <span class="caps">ALL</span> students pass not only state and federally mandated testing but also all classes, whether or not they attend school on a regular basis or complete any of the work assigned. I am to communicate frequently with each students parent by letter, phone, newsletter and grade card.
Im to do all this with a piece of chalk, a computer, some books, a bulletin board, a 45-minute or less planning time, and a big smile, on a starting salary that qualifies my family for food stamps in many states.
Is that all?
And you want me to do all this and expect me to do it without praying? By anders pearson 20 Sep 2002
O’Reilly has released the entire text of the new book <a href=”http://books.mozdev.org/chapters/“>Creating Applications with Mozilla</a> online.
i’m pretty excited to see mozilla starting to turn into a real application platform. some of the projects at <a href=”http://www.mozdev.org/“>mozdev</a> and elsewhere show great promise. i’ve been playing around with the <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/“>mozilla calendar</a> a bit and i’m pretty impressed. it still crashes now and then and has plenty of bugs but is on the way to becoming a really decent calendar app.
since the vast majority of the programming i’ve done has been web-based stuff using html for the user interface, i’ve become very familiar and comfortable with using markup languages like html and xml along with display languages like css to design my interfaces. every once in a while when i decide to write a ‘regular’ GUI application, i have to struggle with the programmatic approach that various widget libraries (Tk, Gtk, qt, swing, etc) use for laying out the buttons and text boxes and such. html forms and user interface elements are very limited though and the stateless nature of http means that many standard desktop applications would be impossible or at least extremely difficult to develop as web applications.
so when mozilla started becoming usable and i first heard about <a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xulref/“>XUL</a>, mozilla’s XML based user interface language, i was pretty excited. you can think of it as basically html expanded so you can actually use it to design interfaces for real honest-to-goodness GUI apps. this kind of thing sounds like a much shallower learning curve for me than other technologies.
because it runs on top of mozilla and mozilla runs on just about every platform, it promises to be very portable. what i’m really excited about is using XUL to write really nice interfaces for client applications that talk to a server via XML-RPC or SOAP.
the only things that bother me about XUL at this point are that from skimming through the book, it looks incredibly verbose. easier to learn isn’t that important if it requires writing 10 times more code. maybe i’m just a spoiled perl programmer, but i’m rather fond of concise code. also it uses javascript as the language for specifying the actual logic of the application. after years of pulling out hair over javascript’s idiosyncrasies and often bizarre syntax (eg, the ‘functions as classes’ object model) it’s just left a bad taste in my mouth. maybe some day someone will figure out a way to use python/perl/scheme/etc to script XUL instead of javascript.
anyway, i should probably go out and actually try writing a simple XUL app or two before i say too much about it. and if i decide that i don’t like XUL, i guess there’s always <a href=”http://sjbrown.geeky.net/metagame-sector/tutorial.html”>python with libglade</a>…
By jere 20 Sep 2002
…tad
By anders pearson 19 Sep 2002
i somehow managed to talk my way into a VIP pass to the NYC <a href=”http://www.meet-the-makers.com/web/3/“>Meet the Makers</a> conference in november. the <a href=”http://www.meet-the-makers.com/web/3/guests.asp”>guest list</a> is starting to look pretty interesting with folks like <a href=”http://www.zeldman.com/“>zeldman</a>, <a href=”http://www.economist.com/“>david wertheimer</a>, and <a href=”http://leslie.harpold.com/“>leslie harpold</a>.
i’m skeptical about the conference in general but any excuse to meet some cool people is probably a good one.
By anders pearson 18 Sep 2002
thanks to <a href=”http://perl.meetup.com/“>meetup.com</a>, i had dinner and some beers last night with <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=26179”>tilly</a> and <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=104919”>perrin</a>. talked about all kinds of perl and computer stuff. for the most part i was just happy that i could follow what they were talking about. hardware setups, webserver caching strategies and modules (perrin has done <a href=”http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/10/17/etoys.html”>lot of research on this</a>), features tilly wants to see in perl 6, the new economy, some general commisserating over being from up north (perrin is from freeport, maine and tilly’s from canada), the life and eventual death of various online communities, got some more background on tilly’s famous <a href=”http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=153046”>break with perlmonks</a>, and all sorts of other geeky stuff. tilly’s wife even joined us for a little bit and was amazingly tolerant of the computer talk.